Forged and incubated in a small rehearsal room in Brooklyn, Elder/Brother harkens back to the razor-efficient songwriting forms of 90’s bands like Nirvana, Fugazi, and Girls Against Boys, while updating the style and stripping the approach to its essential foundations of lyricism and sonic intensity. Elder/Brother is a sound that capitalizes on conspicuous juxtapositions- minimal instrumentation against maximum sound; aggression against beauty; soft melody versus an aggression of expression.

Free My Animal, the project’s first full-length effort, is an album about liberation, belief, and being alive, incorporating elements of more contemporary rock outfits like Death From Above 1979 and Queens of the Stone Age. Produced, recorded, and mixed entirely by Lithgow & Macaleavey, it is a meditation on shedding a skin and becoming a predator in the modern age.

The spine of Free My Animal is a recorded rehearsal of the songs comprising the album, each performed in one-take, without a metronome, in its most organic form. This is the sound of shutting out the rest of the world in order to create something true, undiluted, and and unapologetic.

American Primitive are proud to announce the sophomore release from Winkie, titled “Come To My Party”, on February 19th. it was mixed by Joe Cardamone of The Icarus Line and mastered at Valley Recording Company. It’s available digitally as well as on 150 gram black vinyl (limited to 300, silk screened jacket, hand numbered & with download code) via the bands bandcamp page and at Norman records in the UK.

WINKIE is not here to bring you rainbows. That is a promise. Their sound and live performances have been repeatedly likened to a strobe light induced club meltdown and, to paraphrase a previous review, there are moments that make you feel a bit like you’re simultaneously experiencing a catastrophic hangover while lying in a pool of that stuff you roll on your forehead to relieve headaches.

What began as a film scoring project and alias used by Peter Santiago and Gina Spiteri, WINKIE (the name lifted straight out of a scene in a David Lynch movie) evolved into an actual ‘band’ when the two realized that they were still writing songs after the credits rolled. And those songs became the band's first album “One Day We Pretended to Be Ghosts” which was mastered by Oliver Ackermann of A Place To Bury Strangers and released in 2013. The sold out limited release was a best seller at Norman Records and received support from KXLU’s Part Time Punks, DKFM, WFKU and WFMU. They’ve shared stages with Xeno & Oaklander, Vaniish, Pill, LODRO, Vowws, Parlor Walls and DOOMSQUAD. In March 2015, Winkie contributed a track to the well-received “Leave Them All Behind — A Tribute To Ride” which also included covers by Oliver Ackermann and Ceremony.

And now this New York based duo are back to follow up their remarkable debut with a new album that assure us the best road traveled is always the bleakest one. For their second ride they’ve enlisted the help of The Icarus Line’s Joe Cardamone who knows a thing or two about driving straight into the eye of a storm. The band’s sound brings about comparisons to Christian Death, early-era Swans, Malaria!, X-Mal Deutschland, Cranes, Killing Joke, Curve, My Bloody Valentine by way of soft, sullenly sweet vocals weaving in and out of a minefield of fuzz drenched drone. All brought to you with no guitars. It’s a cheerless desolate soundtrack for the desperate.